What does the Mississippi Delta have going for it? Well, not much at first glance. Folks here sometimes like to stay up all night. Sometimes they sleep all day. Because in the Delta, the land itself is so vastly flat, you can hardly tell if the sun is rising or setting anyway. So it doesn’t really matter when you dream. Dreams here are always under construction but almost never realized.

Time is a continuum in this place of no real beginnings or endings. All year ‘round, hopeful, plastic, snowflakes decorate the downtown streetlights. Never mind that the closest thing to snow around here is the drifts of stray cotton blown to the sides of the roads during picking time. Or that Christmas is half a year away.

Of course, that’s why we like it. To hell with a a calendar. And punching a clock. And anything else that makes you have to do something you just don’t feel like doing right that minute. This is one of the last places left in the world where you have to light up a smoke just to have something to do.

Which is why we came up with Avalon. Sheer boredom. And the remarkable lack of a cigar good enough to distract you for a while. We wanted something that smoked like the music this place is famous for—slow and long and deep.

People like to call Clarksdale the birthplace of the blues. That’s a lie. The music played here is woven from rhythms so ancient, they aren’t even written about in the Bible. Which probably frustrates some people. But not everything has to be the gospel to be the truth.

The name Avalon plays homage to a nearby settlement where one of the great bluesmen—Mississippi John Hurt—was born. He and others like him gave a voice to those ancient rhythms. It’s called the Blues.